Articles

Useful information for busy security dealers.

Creating and Managing a First-Rate Customer Management System

By Scott MacDougal

Vince Lombardi said:
“The greatest accomplishment is not in never falling, but in rising again after you fall.”

Lombardi was really talking about attitude…the willingness to make mistakes, and learn from them, fueled by the desire to be the best at what you do. That attitude is at the heart of great customer service. All security companies manage their accounts. The best ones are obsessed with never making the same mistake twice.

Let’s review some key elements for creating and managing a first-rate customer management system.  It all starts with the mindset of the owner and employees and their dedication to exceeding customer expectations. The payoff for these companies is huge: lower attrition, more referrals to new customers, more cross-sales and a longer average customer life. These all add up to faster growth, higher profits, and more resources to invest in continued growth.

Example –  Referring a New Subscriber
To explore this, let’s start with an example. Say your company, ABC Security, offers 3 months of free monitoring if a customer refers someone who becomes a new subscriber. A customer, Jane, contacts you to say that a neighbor, Joe, is looking for a security company. In this example, what does superior customer service look like? And what does ABC need—software, processes, and people—to deliver it?

First, ABC Security needs to thank Jane. The next steps are to reach out to Joe, if appropriate quote Joe, if successful, install Joe’s new system, set up Joe’s billing and monitoring, reward Jane, and permanently note that Jane referred Joe. These customer and prospect touches need to happen quickly and professionally. ABC Security also needs to continue promoting its “3 months free” program, in order to generate more successful referrals.

An Analogy
As we scope out how ABC can best handle this opportunity, let’s use a simple analogy: a car, a road, and a driver.

The Car: Account Management Software
You need a good car to get to your destination. ABC Security’s immediate destination in this example is a happy customer, Jane, and an impressed and satisfied NEW customer, Joe. ABC’s ‘car’ is its customer management software, which it uses to efficiently manage its accounts and prospects.

Good software gives an alarm company’s staff the information and power it needs to quickly resolve customer issues, manage customer appointments, and be proactive with the customer base over time. If you are ABC Security, and Jane calls in to your office with this lead…what information should you have at your fingertips? Here’s a short list:

  • Jane’s name, address, phone numbers, email, additional contact names
  • Online date and basic components of Jane’s system
  • Jane’s salesperson and system installer(s)
  • Jane’s invoice and payment history
  • Jane’s recurring charge and contract dates (beginning / ending)
  • Jane’s service history
  • A log of previous calls and written correspondence with Jane
  • Ability to quickly enter Joe as a prospect
  • Your salespersons’ and technicians’ calendar(s)

 
With just a few clicks, you can now respond to Jane’s call along these lines: “Jane, we really appreciate your passing along Joe’s name and number. I’ve entered his information into our system. Is it okay if we call him, and use your name? Great. I see that you’ve been our customer for six years…has your system been working properly? Our technician, Henry, was out there last year to fix a broken door contact…have things been working alright since then? Great. Did last month’s storms knock out your power there? Sorry to hear that…if you’re interested, we do offer a cellular backup service that continues your security monitoring even when power is out.” 

We live in the internet age, where things happen fast and people expect instant gratification. The conversation above suggests that ABC has a “good car”, with features that allow its staff to instantly engage Jane about her history with the company, gauge her satisfaction, see that she may need wireless backup, and so on. You’ll leave Jane (and, later, Joe) with the feeling that you know what you’re talking about, you quickly establish rapport, answer questions, and in most cases resolve the issue or set up a service call. If you need to put them on hold, or call them back because you need to go shuffle through paper files—well, you may need a better car.

None of this industry’s common software packages is perfect. But do your homework, and don’t skimp—using the car analogy, you’re going to drive this every day for several years. If you’re at 300 accounts with a goal of getting to 1,000 accounts, buy something that can easily handle 1,000 accounts. If you don’t have most key customer information in one place, your car probably won’t get you where you want to go. The money you save by buying low-cost software will very quickly be offset in staff time, energy and possibly lost accounts because you have to shuffle between multiple sources of information for the same customer. If a single monitored security account is worth $1,000+, you simply can’t risk losing one due to an underpowered car…picture Richard Petty driving a golf cart.

The Road: Policies, Processes & Partnerships
Jane’s referral of Joe started with an ABC policy: 3 months of free monitoring for a successful referral. Policies and partnerships enable ABC to move smoothly and quickly down the road toward its destination—a satisfied and growing customer base. Without these, the road becomes bumpy, winding and long.

Back to our example – when Jane called, the staffer who took the call did not punt to someone else, but took the lead, thanked Jane, and used the call to do some surveying. This is far more customer-friendly than handing off the call. First-class service demands clear policies, which empower ABC’s staff to quickly satisfy their customers’ needs right then and there. Good software obviously helps with this as well. The office manager taking Jane’s call would record call notes in Jane’s software record, add a follow-up step to circle back with Jane once it’s determined whether Joe buys or not (and book a credit if he does), create a prospect record for Joe, direct that record to the person(s) who would follow up with a sales call and quote, who would also need to close the loop when the lead is resolved.

There are many additional processes and policies that could be involved here. It’s important to have detailed checklists and procedure outlines for virtually everything that you do more than once. Why? Because these help us work more efficiently, and allow us to do one another’s jobs if necessary. These process outlines keep us from re-inventing the wheel. Most important, they help us avoid mistakes. It takes far longer to fix a mistake than to follow a checklist that avoids the mistake in the first place. While we hate making mistakes, like any company we’ve made a few. Recalling Lombari, our attitude is: get back up, dust yourself off, and create a procedure so that the mistake NEVER happens again. Your customers will appreciate this perfectionism.

Outsourcing Partnerships
When Jane’s call came in, why was ABC Security ready to take it and run with it? Because they made fast, friendly, proactive customer service a priority. Internally, the company had taken several steps to create “smooth sailing” down their road toward a larger and happier account base. They decided they didn’t need to do everything themselves; instead, they forged critical partnerships with high-quality outsource service providers.

The internet has given rise to many niche businesses that can help security companies offload tasks and functions that are better and more cheaply handled by specialists. A few examples are:

  • Monitoring services
  • Payroll services
  • Billing and payment processing services
  • Credit card batch processing services
  • Invoice printing services
  • Hosted access control and video monitoring services
  • IT support for remote access to the customer database

Let’s take the last one. To avoid creating paper service tickets, ABC Security hired an IT firm to find a better way. They set up secure, online access to service tickets, which technicians can then retrieve from their laptops at home as they begin each day. Upon completing a service call, they open up the ticket from the customer’s location, via a wireless internet service ABC Security provides. They then review and close the ticket, noting the services just performed with the customer, transfer that information to a service invoice, capture the customer’s signature using the laptop and signature capture software, and submit the customer’s credit card information to pay the invoice. The office gets an immediate heads up through the software, processes and posts this payment, and emails a copy of the paid invoice to the customer—before the technician has left the customer site.  It’s a very impressive service.

This ‘paperless’ service call is more than possible—it’s done every day by progressive security companies, large AND small. Setting up a procedure like this, to avoid the inefficiencies of the old ‘paper chase’, pays off in obvious ways. It smooths the road and lets a company go faster by avoiding handoffs and letting the person doing the work directly complete the record of that work in the software, in real time. Yes, this requires some IT expense and training, but it both saves money and conveys a very professional image that gives your customer comfort. The other services listed above will also make your company more agile, and give you more time to be proactive and ready to take Jane’s call. If it seems that your business is constantly trying to ‘put out fires’, you may be in need of both better procedures and a few key outsourcing partnerships.

The Driver: ABCs Staff
Good software, empowering policies, and time-saving outsourcing arrangements are a great start. But you then need people who can get behind the wheel and make those trips happen, every day, accident-free. The Lombardi attitude is key: learn from your mistakes, get better at what you do, and push the envelope to exceed your customer’s expectations.

Regular communication is a start—weekly meetings to review what happened last week, what went right, and what can be improved. These sessions will drive changes in the way you use your software and improved procedures. Ask for input. Encourage people to take ownership. Business owners can become a bottleneck – wanting to sign off on too many things, or be included in too many decisions. So things bog down, and customer service suffers. If this seems to be happening, be willing to create boxes within which your people can operate and make decisions. Use the owner’s decisions over time to help create these boxes; if X happens and the customer profile is Y, then the owner’s decision is always Z.

Many elements of customer management are routine. As outlined in the previous section, great companies automate or outsource routine tasks. However, they also humanize the exceptions. As a billing company for security companies, we’ve automated payment posting. If we receive 1,000 check payments, roughly 900 of these payments are for exactly the amount due—those are posted quickly by our software. For the other 100, we don’t post until we’ve physically reviewed these payments – with human eyeballs. Why? Because a business owner might pay $60 when he was billed $30 for his business – but added a handwritten note “$30 to cover my home security system bill.” Humanizing this exception, and highlighting similar exceptions for our customers, dramatically reduces error and potential complaints. Nothing can replace the human element with a conscientious, ‘let’s make it better’ mindset. 

Finally, when it comes to motivating your staff, it helps to keep score. People like goals, so work with your team to set goals, and let everyone know where things stand versus those goals. Goals can include keeping attrition below some targeted percentage, hitting a certain revenue level, adding so many accounts, or creating bonuses based on a minimum profit level. Achievable, shared goals can create a team atmosphere and build esprit de corps. Good software, solid procedures, and caring, quality people—all heading down the road toward ambitious but achievable goals—can be a very enjoyable ride!